EUROPE: EU to introduce EU major shareholdings public beneficial ownership register

Tuesday April 1 2014

The European Parliament has approved a recommendation from its committees that EU legislation be enacted requiring public beneficial ownership registers for companies and trusts (and similar legal arrangements) for EU major shareholdings. The legislation will be implemented as part of the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive reforms.

The current proposal envisages publicly-accessible central registers that would make available information about the ultimate beneficial owners of all types of legal entities, including companies, foundations and trusts.

In response to privacy concerns, the registers will provide the names of the persons behind a trust, but not the trust’s holdings or purpose. There will also be a registration requirement for persons wishing to access information in the registers.

The European Parliament has voted its first reading of the draft legislation, in order to consolidate the work done so far and hand it over to the next Parliament. This ensures that the MEPs newly elected in May can decide not to start from scratch, but instead build on work done during the current term.

Note that the UK has proposed to introduce a public register of beneficial ownership also, but decided not to extend the rules to trusts. See further the previous update on this.

Click on the above link for more details.